4 Ways to Research Your Salary

You’ve just gotten a new job offer. Or you’ve aced your year-end review and your boss has just given you a raise. You celebrate – for a moment – but then a little voice in the back of your head starts nagging, “is this how much I should be paid? Is this right?”

Instead of coming up with a real answer you put that thought aside and promise that you’ll look into it later. When you have some downtime. But the next year or the next job offer comes around and you’re left asking that same question.

Figuring out your market value can seem like a big task, but it’s not as difficult or time-consuming as we make it seem. It just takes a little research and a willingness to figure it out.

Here are 4 ways you can research your real market rate.

1 – Online surveys

This is likely the first place you think of when you want to do your salary research. Online salary tools like (Know Your Worth from Glassdoor and Payscale.com) are easy and quick to use. Input some information and you’ll get a salary estimate and range in a matter of seconds.

While these tools are a good first place to start, if your research is ending here, you’re really selling yourself short. Online tools often serve up an average, and it can be hard to know where you fall in the range. Different things can affect where you end up in the average, such as additional qualifications, skills, education, and years of experience.

2 – Recruiters and head-hunters

I was speaking with a woman on her ongoing negotiation at work and she was frustrated that she couldn’t get a real measure on what a good salary target would be. She was working in a new city, didn’t feel the online pay calculators represented what she was doing, and she didn’t have a huge network. She kept saying “I feel like I’m being underpaid but I really have no idea.” Obviously, this isn’t a strong place to start your negotiation from.

As we continued talking she mentioned that her boss knew she was valuable because he saw how many phone calls she got from recruiters and headhunters, trying to interest her in new jobs. When I asked her how she usually responded to them, she said that she either didn’t return their call or would tell them that she wasn’t interested.

She never asked about salary.

This is a huge missed opportunity. Recruiters will often share salary ranges up front, to make sure it’s a job you’re interested in. They see hundreds of jobs per year and usually have very deep knowledge in regard to hiring in a specific industry. They have a wealth of information that most people, including this woman, fail to take advantage of.

3 – Your network

Here’s where networking really pays off – having peers or mentors that you can turn to for your market research.

We all know that it’s pretty taboo to come out and ask your co-workers what they’re being paid. Many companies actually have policies prohibiting you from doing this. But there’s a difference between asking your colleagues what they’re making and tapping into your network of peers and mentors to understand what different salary ranges are appropriate.

In business school, I learned quickly that it was natural to ask these types of questions. While my classmates and I didn’t ask people what they were making, we did use conversations as a way to understand what companies, industries, and cities were paid the most and the least. I would usually phrase this as, “I’m looking at a [job title] position in [this city]. Do you know what an appropriate salary range for that is?”

So much good information was shared and the conversations didn’t feel weird, forced, or personal. Tapping into your network of peers and mentors can provide you with some of the most accurate information you’ll find.

4 – Your company

This one is almost always overlooked, but a lot of work places are actually open to sharing salary range information. If you work for a large company, they may have defined compensation levels based on job titles. They may even publish this information so it’s accessible to employees. A healthy workplace will be clear and communicative about how they approach compensation.

If you decide to talk with your supervisor or HR about the salary range for your job title and find out that you’re paid at the lower end, this is a perfect opportunity to understand why. And if you do find out that you’re at the top of the pay range, don’t assume that compensation negotiation isn’t in your future: there may be exceptions in which they can raise the ceiling or you can negotiate for other benefits.

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2 Comments

Jaqueline
on November 25, 2017 at 6:52 pm

I’m at a similar place as the woman in step 2. I’ve taken on additional responsibilities, and I know I am being paid at the lower end comparing it to someone who’s been at the company 5 years more than I have. I want to negotiate my base salary and bonus, however, I am not confident that conversation will go well until I figure out how much I should ask for. I checked at Glassdoor, PayScale, and job postings, and nothing out there describes what I actually do. Am I wrong to be looking for what I actually do, since my title is very basic?

Hi Jacqueline! I’m glad that you’re doing the legwork to figure out what you want to ask for (or what you’d be happy with). You’re not wrong to look at what you’re doing and try to compare it with what’s out there, though this is definitely one of the limitations that of salary calculators. Job postings are usually very general and don’t give the most accurate view of what job responsibilities actually are. A different way to approach this is you could list out a few of your main job responsibilities and then figure out what that title would be at different companies (this is where networking comes in!). If you can figure out a comparable title at a few different companies, you’ll have an easier time deciding what job postings and salaries are applicable to you. You also may want to look at something like Glassdoor’s know your worth calculator because it will show you job descriptions from similar companies as well as giving you your salary estimate, so you can get a sense of other companies/titles. And finally, companies with formal payscales in place will share that information with their employees, so it doesn’t hurt to ask what the pay range for your job title is.

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